If all of us hosts could agree not to charge a cleaning fee, and instead incorporate it into our prices, I would remove the cleaning fee in a heartbeat. I would do this by taking my cleaning fee and dividing it by my average booking length, and then adding the result to the per-night price. This would make the effective cleaning fee less for shorter stays and more for longer stays, hopefully pretty much balancing out in the end.
The problem with this, though, is that if we all don’t remove the cleaning fee, the ones who don’t will have a competitive advantage, because their lower base price will show up more favorably in searches, even though the total stay price might be comparable.
Because it’s unlikely that all of us will all drop our cleaning fees, Airbnb needs to prominently display the total price including cleaning, taxes, and other fees, and also use the total price in their search algorithms, instead of the room price. That would level the playing field whether we charge a separate cleaning fee or not.
This seems like such an obvious solution, and I don’t quite understand why Airbnb doesn’t do it, especially with all the recent hoopla over cleaning fees. There must be a fairly compelling reason.
